New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

How do race and sexuality intersect in the American sitcom? In The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021),  Alfred L Martin, an assistant professor of communication studies at The University of Iowa, explores the production and reception of Black-cast sitcoms, along with a detailed analysis of the representations of gay men within this genre. At the centre of the book is a theorisation of the generic closet, both as a way to explain the absence of nuanced and complex representations of Black gay men on screen, and to account for the limited, decentred, and peripheral place offered to Black gay men in the Black-cast sitcom. Offering detailed engagement with the history and political economy of television, along with insights into writers’ rooms, production decisions, and audience responses, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture.Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. In Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir (Little a, 2021), Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them.Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future. Dr. Christina Gessler is a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Steven Capsuto's book Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV (2020) explores the fight for lesbian and gay visibility on 20th-century American television, as gay activists faced off with powerful, often vicious "traditional values" crusaders, with TV executives caught in the crossfire.It documents countless programs, characters, and political skirmishes, examining lesbian and gay portrayals and the few pioneering depictions of bisexual and trans people.The first edition was a semifinalist for what is now the Stonewall Book Award and has been widely used in universities. This revised edition, fact-checked from scratch, reinstates material that the original publisher cut and adds about 100 photos of TV shows from the early days to the year 2000.The author built this account of events from archival materials, a thousand broadcast recordings, and his interviews with showrunners, network and studio executives, and early activists.Steven Capsuto began researching sexual-minority images on television in 1987 while volunteering with a lesbian and gay crisis hotline. Since 1990, he has given video-illustrated lectures in dozens of cities about televised LGBTQ portrayals. The first edition of his book, Alternate Channels, was a semifinalist for what is now the Stonewall Book Award. From the 1980's to 2000's oversaw the GLBT Library/Archives of Philadelphia (first the library and later the archives). He has served as a historical consultant or researcher on documentaries such as After Stonewall, TV Revolution, and The Question of Equality, and for the 2020 documentary series Visible: Out on Television. John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University.Morris Ardoin is author of Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy. He earned a bachelor’s in journalism from Louisiana State University and a master’s in communication from the University of Louisiana. A public relations practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

On October 2nd, 1977, Glenn Burke, outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, made history without even swinging a bat. When his teammate Dusty Baker hit a historic home run, Glenn enthusiastically congratulated him with the first ever high five.But Glenn also made history in another way--he was the first openly gay MLB player. While he did not come out publicly until after his playing days were over, Glenn's sexuality was known to his teammates, family, and friends. His MLB career would be cut short after only three years, but his legacy and impact on the athletic and LGBTQIA+ community would resonate for years to come.New York Times bestselling author Andrew Maraniss tells the story of Glenn Burke: from his childhood growing up in Oakland, his journey to the MLB and the World Series, the joy in discovering who he really was, to more difficult times: facing injury, addiction, and the AIDS epidemic.Packed with black-and-white photographs and thoroughly researched, never-before-seen details about Glenn's life, Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke (Philomel Books, 2021) is the fascinating story of a trailblazer in sports--and the history and culture that shaped the world around him.Paul Knepper used to cover the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in September 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Panoramic and provocative in its scope, John Geoffrey Scott and Christian Grov's The Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society (Routledge, 2021) is the definitive guide to contemporary issues associated with male sex work and a must read for those who study masculinities, male sexuality, sexual health, and sexual cultures.This groundbreaking volume will have a powerful impact on our understanding of this challenging, elusive subject. While the internet has brought the previously hidden worlds of male sex work more starkly into public view, academic research has often remained locked into descriptions of male sex workers and their clients as perverse. Drawing from a variety of regions, the chapters provide insights into the historical, popular cultural, social, and economic aspects of sex work, as well as demographic patterns, health outcomes, and policy issues. This approach shifts thought on male sex work from a hidden "social problem" to a publicly acknowledged "social phenomenon." The book challenges myths and reconceptualizes male sex work as a discrete field. Importantly, it provides a vehicle for the voices of male sex workers and new and established scholars. This richly detailed, humane, and innovative collection retrieves male sex work from silence and invisibility on the one hand and its association with scandal and stigma on the other. The findings within have profound implications for how governments approach public health and regulation of the sex industry and for how society can make sense of the complexities of human sexualities. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In this episode, I interview Michael Snediker, professor of English at the University of Houston, about his book, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment, recently published by University of Minnesota Press. At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable.Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention. Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)highlights how transnational forces—including (im)migration, trade, and tourism—to and from the Caribbean shaped Miami’s queer past. The book has received six awards and honors, including the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association for the best book written on Southern history.Dr. Julio Capó, Jr. is a transnational historian whose research and teaching interests include modern U.S. history, especially the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America. He addresses how gender and sexuality have historically intersected with constructions of ethnicity, race, class, nation, age, and ability. He teaches introductory and specialized courses on all these subjects, as well as courses on public history.Leo Valdes is a graduate student in the History Department at Rutgers University. In addition to being a host for the LGBTQ Studies channel on the New Books Network, they are an oral historian with the Latino New Jersey Oral History Project at Rutgers University and Voces of the Pandemic, a collaborative oral history project with Voces Oral History Center at UT Austin. Their dissertation explores how criminalization and race shaped trans cultures and politics in the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Imagine a rodeo rider atop a bucking bronco, hat in hand, straining to remain astride. Is the rider in your mind's eye white? Is the person male? Popular imaginings and high level, televised, professional rodeo circuits have created a stereotyped image of who rodeo is by and for, but it is far too limited an image, and one that does not reflect reality.In Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Race, Gender, and Identity in the American Rodeo (University Press of Kansas, 2020), Dr. Elyssa Ford, an associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University, paints a very different image of rodeo than what Western myth would have one believe. Ford argues that rodeo has, from its creation, both a vehicle for rebellion and a place of refuge for groups of people told they didn't belong in the American West, let alone in Western rodeo. From Hawaiian ranching culture to Black and gay rodeo, men and women have used professional riding as a powerful expression of self in a nation that has often tried to deny their very personhood. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The last several decades have seen tremendous political and cultural strides forward for the LGBTQ+ community with both the legislative and cultural recognition helping many secure a more safe and open lifestyle than possible just a short while ago. However, these advances have raised a number of criticisms and qualifications, and not just from stuffy conservatives either. Many on the radical left have argued that the advances of gay, trans and queer persons is part of a broader attempt by the powers of capital to present an increasingly brutal economic society with a friendlier face, one of diversity and inclusion. This critique has led to a counter-critique of class-reductionism, the treatment of every issue and person from a very basic class-perspective.Diving right into this debate is my guest today, Peter Drucker, here to discuss his book Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Brill, 2015). Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series, Drucker's book is unapologetically Marxist in its orientation and presents a massive history of sexual orientations and identity throughout much of human history, with particular focus on gender formations under colonialism, industrialization, and the more recent cases of Fordist and Neoliberal capitalism. However, Drucker also sees things that Marxists could learn from contemporary queer theory and practice as they try to navigate a world that was not designed for them, and as they try to build a better one.Rich in information and attentive to historical detail, this book is a fascinating combination of history, queer theory and political science that will be helpful to everyone who hopes to someday see a world where we all belong.Peter Drucker received his PhD in political science at Columbia University. A lifelong activist on the radical left, he has published widely on socialist theory and history, and has also written extensively on LGBTQ+ issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

How did the gay movement, which began as a sedate group of intellectuals, become what is arguably the most dynamic civil rights crusade in America? How did a deviant and marginalized fraction of society evolve into powerful, effective, and respected leaders? Activist Morris Kight, a sometimes ignored leader of the post-Stonewall gay rights movement, self-aggrandizing and egotistical in a room full of egos, always found the camera and a way to give gay rights a seat at the table of social reform. His style of organizing and activism showed the power of the “influencer” decades before social media brought millions together with a meme.His work in the 1950s as a part of an underground network of gay ‘safe houses’ that provided bail, health care, and legal advice was based on his early Socialist beliefs. He turned his unique charisma and organizing skills to the 1960s anti-war movement before deciding to devote the rest of his life to the public fight for “Gay Liberation.” He fostered key relationships with fellow activists such as Harvey Milk, politicians, socialites, and gangsters. He had backroom deals with wealthy business owners and handshake agreements with power brokers. This led to a new quality of life for homosexuals, liberated homo youths and, eventually, led to the first generation of never-closeted Gays.Kight helped organize the first gay pride parade in the country in 1970. He founded groups that lead seminal protests that resulted in: The American Psychiatric Association removing homosexuality as a disease from its diagnostic manual, protecting civil rights for gay citizens in California, and reducing police violence against the gay community. And for every good thing he did, he took credit for more. He was a man who, with his many flaws, managed to alienate as many people as he brought together. His story brings to life his work as remembered by those who loved and loathed him.  Mary Ann Cherry befriended Morris Kight in the last decade of his life. She, with Morris’s permission, began writing his biography. Cherry is a Los Angeles based writer whose wide-ranging work includes, television and film producing as well as creating and maintaining the historical archives for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.Morris Ardoin is the author of STONE MOTEL – MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi). A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies